I get a lot of requests for help that involve not being on the front page of Google's search results. There are lots of reasons that can happen, and I can usually help.Last week, I had such a request that turned out to have a very easy answer: "You're not indexed."I heard those word myself, years ago when I had been given the assignment by my then employer to make our online catalog profitable. Joel, a hardware guy of our acquaintance, was over for dinner, and I was complaining about the fact... Read Full Story
"Word of mouth marketing doesn't work," the woman I was talking with said scornfully. And then thought a moment. "Except for you."It's true that I had a marketing plan back when I first started my business, and haven't been able to implement it yet because I have too much work to do. I keep thinking that I need to do some email marketing or something, but I don't have time -- we're turning away work as it is.This is a nice problem to have.Here's the thing: I don't drive people to my website b... Read Full Story
Some say that the Friday after Thanksgiving is called "Black Friday" because that's the typical day on which retail operations get into the black, or begin earning a profit for the year. Others say (with better historical data) that the term "Black Friday" actually refers to the experience of retail workers and police officers coping with the beginning of the holiday season.Neither of those is the myth. The myth is that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year. It... Read Full Story
"Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" was a hit song in 1927, and the phrase was used thereafter to describe the logical fallacy known as the Bandwagon Fallacy: the idea that if a lot of people believe something, it must be true.I kind of felt this way about pay per click advertising at search engine results pages. I've never seen a client get better results with PPC than with organic search, but it must be good because lots of people do it.So, when a large company offered me $100 worth of... Read Full Story
Sometimes I write the content first and then the designer builds a design with that content. Sometimes the design comes first and I write content to fit that design. And sometimes both steps are being worked on at once.So it is that I occasionally get an alarmed email from a client saying, perhaps, that "the homepage looks okay, but the inner pages have Italian in them."It's lorem upsum. This is actually a passage from Cicero, sort of messed up by a printer in the 1500s who needed some random... Read Full Story
Rosie and I were admiring a new website I was writing for. The design was particularly beautiful, for a corporate site, with an elegance of line and color that made me want to just gaze at it for a bit.Rosie wasn't so sure. It seemed to her that it would be improved if there were some... flashy stuff. Things that whirled around, maybe, or opportunities to shoot someone.Rosie's a gamer when she's not managing projects or delving into analytics. I've tried to convince her that getting to the ... Read Full Story
I've written before about content management systems, and specifically about whether you want them in your website or not. There are good points on both sides.One of the undoubted benefits to a CMS, however, is the ease with which you can add graphics. Say you want to add a special image to your website for the holidays. You use Blogger or Wordpress, you just push a couple of buttons and your graphic is just where you want it to be. If not, then it's more complex. You have to have skills.Clev... Read Full Story
There's been a lot of talk about PageRank lately. Google has suggested that people are getting too het up over it, and there has been a flood of posts with titles like "Does PageRank Matter Any More?"My PageRank just increased, and I got a bit of a kick out of it. Do I expect it to change my life? No.PageRank is like grades in school. It's one indication of how you're doing. If your PageRank is increasing, that's probably a good thing. If your PageRank hasn't improved recently, that's not a g... Read Full Story
The apples shown here are divided into the #1 rankings ones and the #2 ranking ones. "Not as pretty, " those #2 apples, "but just as tasty."It's a reminder that we don't all get #1 rankings in the search engine results pages for everything. Sometimes we don't deserve that #1 ranking. I, for example, am not the biggest SEO and copywriting firm in the world. If I type in "SEO" at Google, or "copywriting," I'm not going to be #1. This is fine with me. (I'm #1 for "quality copywriting," though. ... Read Full Story
